Biblical Latin: How to Read the Vulgate as a Learner

Most people meet real Latin in Caesar or Cicero, and most people bounce. Caesar runs a sentence for four lines before producing a verb; Cicero writes periods so architectural that editors indent the subordinate clauses. Both are magnificent. Neither is a first text.

The first text is the Vulgate, and it is free.

Why the Vulgate is the easiest real Latin there is

Jerome finished the bulk of his translation around the turn of the fifth century, from Hebrew for the Old Testament and from the Greek for the gospels. What came out is plain on purpose, because it was read aloud to congregations who had to follow it at the speed of speech, and plain by accident, because Hebrew and Greek syntax show through the Latin at every seam.

Four properties a learner should be greedy for:

• Short sentences. Main clause, full stop, main clause. Whole chapters pass without a subordinate clause three deep.
• A small vocabulary, repeated to death. Genesis 1 uses Deus more than thirty times in thirty-one verses, and Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum recurs verbatim at verses 10, 12, 18, 21 and 25. No textbook exercise repeats anything that ruthlessly.
• Verb-first word order. Dixitque Deus, Vidit Deus. The Hebrew puts its verb first, the Latin follows, and the sentence arrives roughly in the order English wants it.
• You already half know it. The unfair advantage. When you can guess the sense, all your effort goes into the grammar rather than into the plot.

None of which requires you to believe a word of it. This is the most reproduced Latin text in existence, it shaped the vocabulary of every western European language, and it is out of copyright. Take the free lunch.

The text below is the Clementine Vulgate, standard since 1592 and public domain. Printed editions use the ligature in cælum and tenebræ; this article writes them out as caelum and tenebrae, the same text in modern type. Translations are mine and deliberately literal, so they will sometimes sit oddly against the wording you know.

Genesis 1:1-5, word by word

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In principio is in plus the ablative of principium. In takes the ablative for position and the accusative for motion towards, and nothing is moving here.

Creavit is third person singular perfect active of creo: a completed act at a point in time, created, and that was that. Hold on to it, because John's opening does the opposite with a different tense and means something quite different by it.

Deus is nominative and therefore the subject, sitting cheerfully after its verb. Caelum and terram are both accusative objects. Terram announces itself with the -am; caelum is neuter, and neuter nouns share one form for nominative and accusative, so only the sense tells you it is the object.

Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi: et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.

But the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was being carried over the waters.

Autem means but and is postpositive: it never stands first, so it lands in second place and you translate it as though it were first. Erat is imperfect, a state rather than an event.

Inanis et vacua is a small gift. Both are nominative feminine singular agreeing with terra, but inanis is a third-declension adjective and vacua a first-and-second-declension one, so one phrase shows you both adjective families agreeing with the same noun.

Tenebrae is plural in form and singular in sense: Latin has no singular for darkness. Super faciem is super plus the accusative of facies, fifth declension, and abyssi is a genitive. Spiritus is fourth declension. Two verses in and you have met four of the five declensions.

Ferebatur is imperfect passive: was being carried. Familiar English versions say moved or hovered, which reads better and hides the passive.

Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux.

And God said: let light be made. And light was made.

Dixitque is dixit with -que stuck on the end. -que is a full word meaning and that never stands alone: it attaches to the first word of the unit it joins. When you hit a word ending in -que that no dictionary contains, chop the -que off and look up what is left. Beware the words that only look like the trick: atque, neque, itaque, namque, quisque and uterque are single words in their own right.

Fiat is the present subjunctive of fio, to be made or to become, which serves as the passive of facio. Standing alone in a main clause it is a jussive subjunctive, the form Latin uses to order somebody who is not the person being addressed. So: let light be made. Lux is nominative, not accusative, because nothing here has an object. This is the most quoted subjunctive in the language, and almost nobody who uses the phrase knows they are quoting one.

Facta est is the perfect passive: the participle facta plus the present of sum. Two traps in three words. The participle agrees like an adjective, so it is feminine to match lux. And Latin builds a past passive out of the present of sum, so facta est means was made, not is made.

Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona: et divisit lucem a tenebris.

And God saw the light, that it was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

Here is the sentence that matters. Vidit is perfect, lucem is its accusative object, and then comes quod esset bona.

Classical Latin does not do this. Cicero reports what somebody saw or said with an accusative and infinitive: vidit lucem esse bonam, he saw the light to be good. The Vulgate writes quod plus a finite verb in the subjunctive instead: he saw that it was good. Esset is the imperfect subjunctive of sum, chosen because vidit is past, and bona is feminine to match the light. In the refrain running through the rest of the chapter the object drops out and the adjective goes neuter: et vidit Deus quod esset bonum.

If that construction feels natural to you, that is the point. Quod here is doing the job that became French que, Spanish que, Italian che and English that. You are watching Romance grammar being assembled out of Latin parts, centuries before anyone would call it Romance.

A tenebris is a plus the ablative, the ablative of separation. It is a before a consonant and ab before a vowel, the same instinct that gives English a and an.

Appellavitque lucem Diem, et tenebras Noctem: factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus.

And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night, and there was evening and morning, day one.

Appellavit takes a double accusative: lucem is what he called, Diem is what he called it. English does the same without thinking about it.

Dies unus is a monument to literal translation. The Hebrew says day one, not the first day, and Jerome kept it rather than tidying it to dies primus. Familiar English versions tidy it.

John 1:1-5: one tense doing all the work

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est. In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum: et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. This was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not grasp it.

John opens with the same three words as Genesis and then swaps one verb, and the swap is the whole argument.

Genesis has creavit, a perfect: a completed act at a point. John has erat, an imperfect: a state with no beginning marked inside it. Had he written fuit, the perfect of sum, it would have meant there was a Word and then that was over with. Erat and fuit differ by one syllable and by everything else.

The contrast repeats inside the passage. Things get made at a point (facta sunt, factum est, both perfect passive) while the Word simply erat. Then verse 5 jumps to the present: lucet, shines. In the middle of a passage in the past, the light is in the present tense. That is deliberate.

Three small things worth catching:

• Et Deus erat Verbum has two nominatives and no way of telling from the endings which is the subject. Convention, and the Greek behind it, make Verbum the subject.
• Quod factum est is quod as a relative pronoun, which, not the that of Genesis 1:4. Quod is three different words wearing one coat: relative pronoun, the conjunction because, and the Vulgate's that. Only the clause tells you which.
• Comprehenderunt means both grasped with the mind and seized. The King James has comprehended, modern versions overcame. The ambiguity is there in the Greek, so both are defensible and neither is the translation.

Where Vulgate Latin parts company with Cicero

Renaissance humanists hated it, because their measure of Latin was Cicero and by that measure the Vulgate is barbarous. Jerome was anxious about it himself: he tells Eustochium of a dream in which he is hauled before a judge and accused, Ciceronianus es, non Christianus, you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. Augustine, opening the scriptures as an educated young man, found them unworthy of comparison with Cicero and put them down.

Both got over it. Jerome's defence, in his letter on translation, is that in scripture even the order of the words is a mystery, so he would not smooth it. Which is also why the text is so useful to us: the Latin has been left transparent to the languages underneath it. The humanists won the argument about style and lost the argument about readership.

How to read it without stalling

Start with Genesis, then John, then Mark. Save the Psalms, the prophets and Paul's letters, which are hard for reasons unrelated to your Latin. Read with the English in a parallel column and do not feel clever about it: the point is volume, not virtue. Reread one chapter three times rather than three chapters once, and read it aloud, because it was written to be heard.

What to take away

• The Vulgate is the easiest large body of real Latin: short sentences, small vocabulary, brutal repetition, and you often know the sense already.
• Creavit is perfect (a completed act); erat is imperfect (a state with no start marked). Genesis and John open with the same words and differ only there.
• -que is a word meaning and, glued to the back of the first word it joins. Chop it off and look up the rest.
• Fiat lux is a jussive subjunctive, and it is the subjunctive everybody already quotes.
• Facta est is perfect passive: participle plus the present of sum, meaning was made.
• Vidit Deus quod esset bonum replaces the classical accusative and infinitive with quod plus a subjunctive. That is where que, che and that come from.
• Grammarians sniffed. Everyone else could read it.

Ready to take this further? The Latin course builds the vocabulary and the grammar in the order you need them, and the Latin grammar articles cover the perfect tense, the subjunctive and indirect statement in full, each with drills. Come back to Genesis once you have the perfect tense under you: it reads completely differently the second time.